


Pulled Back

by lodessa



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Boundaries, Could Be Canon, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Episode: s03e08 Future's End, Episode: s03e11 Q and the Grey, Episode: s03e15 Coda, Episode: s03e26 Scorpion, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 18:04:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10667949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: “Is this where you tell me that we can’t keep doing this, that our… connection is a liability to our ability to function should something happen-”Chakotay turns his face away from hers, gaze moving back to the holographic image of Lake George.“No,” she realizes,  taking his head in her hands and guiding his face back towards hers, “It’s not.  That narrative isn’t helping anything.  I’m still cheating, wearing these barrettes in my hair like a knight’s token of favor, an invitation I can but won’t revoke and you know it, don’t you?”“Of course I’d noticed,” he confirms, moving one hand to the back of her head, and tracing the shape of the rectangular ornamentation that same hand carved, “You have me classically conditioned at this point to respond to your hair styling as an answer to a question I can’t ask.”





	Pulled Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rawkfemme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rawkfemme/gifts).



**Future’s End**

In retrospect, she should have worn her hair up. At the very least, Kathryn admits to herself, she should not have given in to the impulse that had led her to take the delicately carved, ivory-colored, barrette she kept (against her better judgement) in her nightstand and wear it down to Earth’s surface (four centuries back or not). Each seemingly innocent decision cascaded into the next: The choice of away team members. The way she’d split them up once they’d gotten down there. Small indulgences like letting herself lean into the protective shelter of Chakotay’s broad shouldered frame in the bustle of 20th century crowds.

There isn’t time to go back to her quarters and re-arrange her hair completely and that overreaction would be perhaps worse than doing nothing. She has to do something though.

The replicator in her ready room has dozens of different options and she chooses one more or less at random. Though, the choice of metal is intentional: it is cool and light against her fingers as she switches the two out. For a moment she stares down at the intricate detail of the other, feeling it warm and solid in the palm of her hand, pulled back into reminiscing.

“I’ve noticed you seem to be pushing your hair out of the way a lot,” Chakotay had offered, holding it out to her, like it was a simple matter of logistics.

“I should just wear it up,” she’d shrugged, going back to her research on a cure for the virus which had them stranded on that planet.

“I think it looks nice down,” he’d winked, before retreating to a safe distance.

She tries not to think about it later: his hands running through her hair as the trees rustled outside their shelter.

_You told yourself you would let it go_ , she hastily stows the clip in a desk drawer.

He’d promised too (under duress), but she couldn’t lay the blame at his feet for what happened earlier today, not really.

“You kept it,” he’d commented, ducking his head with a soft smile that just barely started to reveal his dimples.

“It was a beautiful gift,” she had been the one to say, leaning closer under his arm as they walked.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to remember.”

His fingers had traced the edges they had carved in a completely different quadrant and century, but it had been Kathryn who’d turned her face up into his and breathed, “I’ll always remember all of it.”

The lapels of the blazer he was wearing were too perfect of a hand hold to ignore, and she pushed up onto her toes as she pulled him in towards her.

Something that technically happened over three hundred years before either of them were born could be excused, a voice inside of her had justified.

She can’t allow herself the indulgence, whatever Stardate and coordinates they might technically be inhabiting for the moment. She takes a deep breath and counts backwards from ten, trying to remember a shorthand meditation form that Tuvok had once tried to impart to her.

_Ten._ The warmth of Chakotay’s skin.

_Nine._ The security of his arm around her.

_Eight._ His fingertips brushing the nape of her neck.

_Seven._ The unevenness of the stucco on the wall of the alleyway against her palms.

_Six._ The feeling of her nerve endings coming back to life.

_Five._ Regulations and procedure.

_Four._ The softness of his well formed lips.

_Three._ The headache inducing Temporal Prime Directive.

_Two._ The life she’d left back home on the surface of 24th Century Earth.

_One._ Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager.

It looks like it’s up to her to ensure that future happens at all, instead of a timeline corrupted beyond repair, no matter how novel hiding out in the past might seem in the moment. She spares one last glance back at her desk and then exits her ready room.

 

**Q and the Grey**

Her hand flies immediately to the back of her head, relief spreading across her chest as she feels it there, the coolness of the metal and the points of the shape. After everything, it is reassuring, somehow as much so as her return to her ship, more so than being back in her uniform. Uniforms could be replicated.

Checking had the reverse effect when she’d arrived in the Continuum, chaos around her, corseted, and reached back to feel it was gone.

It was patently ridiculous, of course, with everything else Q had pulled, to be upset about a hair clip. Worse yet, it drove home a point she hadn’t wanted made.

“I noticed you seemed to prefer metal these days, more official I suppose,” Chakotay had glanced down and away before flitting his gaze back up to meet hers.

“I didn’t know you did metalworking,” she’d not exactly replied, marveling a little at the gift, though his calculations were wrong. It wasn’t the materials but the sentimentality that had been unprofessional. Did he know that? Was this a test?

“I have a lot of free time off duty,” he’d shrugged, “Not exactly a packed social calendar.”

She’d meant not to wear it, but somehow it had ended up in her hair anyway, and in that moment, when her reality had been ripped away from her, that had been the loss that had stung the most sharply.

Chakotay. In that moment there had been nowhere to hide from the clarity. She’d thought to herself that, if he could read her thoughts just then, he wouldn’t have had any more cause or room to be bothered, not about Q, not about anyone.

Now here she is, back home on Voyager, safe and sound. She allows herself a slightly lingering glance, thoughts turning from her day to his. How he’d resisted Q’s goading, how he’d persuaded Lady Q to his way of thinking, his heroic rescue plan.

_Why didn’t you tell me there was another man?_

There couldn’t be. Her fingers trace over the surface of the metal. Mapping it the way her eyes map his profile.

_Is it the tattoo?_

Q knows everything. It makes his little games all the more frustrating. He’d known. She has to think he’d always known. The universe, it feels, is laughing at her.

Later, she realizes: later she will let a digestible bit slip.

“Q was jealous of you, you know,” she’ll smirk, like it’s someone else’s secret she’s unveiling over dinner.

“Oh?” he’ll lean back, take another sip of cider, like he’s casually disinterested but the gleam in his eyes will tell a different story, “I’m pretty sure he was just trying to get a rise out of you.”

“All of space and time bending under his fingertips, but he couldn’t so much as tempt me.”

“I could have told him you were immune to all temptation,” he’ll chuckle, but there will be something brittle in the laugh.

“I’d say more resistant than immune in certain cases.” Her laugh will have a flutter of anxiety, as she unclips the barrette and disentangles it from her hair to hold it out between them.

“I told Q I’d make him wish he was a microscopic single celled organism if he didn’t return this.”

His hand will cover hers and she will hook her fingers with his.

“I could have made you a new one, you know,” he will smile and it will be warmer than his touch even, and just for a little while she will indulge in the solace offered by both.

 

**Coda**

  
This was already where she was headed, before the crash, before the time loop.

She has to admit that to herself, as she nestles against Chakotay, fingertips tracing the nape of his neck. There was no other reason it had to be the two of them on that shuttle alone. It was happening more often now; she reaches back with her other hand to assure herself the hand-carved barrette is still in place: It is. Every time, she feeds herself little lies that this isn’t what she’s doing, that it’s just this once.

She suspects she fools him a little more than she does herself. Though, honestly she’s not sure that’s correct, that her actions aren’t all the more transparent to him, patiently waiting for her to catch up.

She could. She knows that. It would be easier.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she says it out loud.

“Physically or metaphorically?” he turns his face away from the water and looks down to where hers is resting against his chest, studying it carefully.

“Either,” she admits, sitting up straight before moving around in front of him on the sand of the lake shore to kneel directly before him, “Today was a reminder that I can’t control what happens.”

“I don’t know about that,” he suggests, tucking a stray hair that has escaped behind her ear, giving her an out, “I’m pretty sure sucessfully staring down death counts as evidence to the contrary.”

“That isn’t really what I meant,” she replies, wrestling with what to tell them both, “I saw you when I thought I was dead and… I know it was in my own mind, but that was almost worse than the idea of losing myself.”

“Neither of us are going anywhere, Kathryn,” he tells her reassuringly, placing his hands on her hips and tracing the curve towards her waist with his thumbs, “except back to the Alpha Quadrant.”

“You don’t know that,” she argues, pulling herself forward into his lap and wrapping her legs around him, “Either of us could have died today. We both could have.”

“Is this where you tell me that we can’t keep doing this, that our… connection is a liability to our ability to function should something happen-”

Chakotay turns his face away from hers, gaze moving back to the holographic image of Lake George.

“No,” she realizes, taking his head in her hands and guiding his face back towards hers, “It’s not. That narrative isn’t helping anything. I’m still cheating, wearing these barrettes in my hair like a knight’s token of favor, an invitation I can but won’t revoke and you know it, don’t you?”

“Of course I’d noticed,” he confirms, moving one hand to the back of her head, and tracing the shape of the rectangular ornamentation that same hand carved, “You have me classically conditioned at this point to respond to your hair styling as an answer to a question I can’t ask.”

“I’m sorry,” she says and she means it, “It’s been unfair of me.”

“I don’t mind,” Chakotay sounds convincing, but she still presses her lips to his cheek in apology, “I told you, whatever I can do.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “It’s not helping, whatever I wanted to pretend.”

“Kathryn?”

He leans back a little to get a better look at her, like he can’t quite make up his mind about how to interpret the mood she’s fallen into.

“Ask, Chakotay. Ask me that question.”

She finds she’s not just inviting him to ask but imploring him. She wants him to ask, maybe even needs it.

“You wear them on purpose don’t you? It’s a decision about how you are going to approach your day... your night.”

“Yes.”

Her fingers tug lightly on his hair, an outlet for the tension coiled inside her, waiting to see how far this will go.

“So that means, when you woke up this morning you already had this planned.”

“Yes, not the sail specifically, but the part that matters.”

Her words sound off, even to her, pulling them off track, but Chakotay doesn’t take the bait.

“So it’s not just a reaction to a near death experience.”

This is dangerous territory, ground she’s been avoiding. It’s been easier, easier to pretend it was spontaneous when she slipped, that it was a slip and not a deliberate transgression. Lies usually feel that way.

“No.”

No ornamentation to hide behind, just a simple declaration. She’s pretty sure he expected her to deny it, but she’s tired of her own evasions.

“And the next time you wear your hair with a clasp I made you...”

“You can expect to end up in my bed, Chakotay,” her words sound blunt, inelegant to her own ears, “At least if you still want to.”

She feels the need to add the last bit, as if he hasn’t been saying every metaphor for yes all along, as if he’s been the one leaving her in doubt of his intentions.

“That,” he says with a heaviness but not a sadness, gently running a fingertip along her jaw to her chin, down her throat, and past her clavicle. “Will never change.”

“I can’t promise never, no matter how much I want to,” she sighs, but she kisses him nonetheless, pressing their bodies more closely together.

 

**Scorpion**

  
_I know you, Kathryn._ Why do the words hurt? They shouldn’t hurt. Chakotay. She reaches out but he slips from her fingers.

Three days of stubble on his face. _I should clean up first,_ he murmurs, the warmth of his hands digging into her shoulders with his grasp. _I don’t care,_ she rumbles, _Right now, I don’t care about any of it._

_A fatal mistake._ It echoes through her.

Their home on New Earth. The softness of the dog’s fur under her fingertips and the embrace of Chakotay wrapped around her back. _But there was no dog on New Earth,_ a voice insists, even as she looks down at the russet coat and big soft eyes.

She turns around and it’s not New Earth, no that’s her family home.

_You don’t know when to step back,_ Chakotay accuses, tone starting soft but sharpening and then she looks back to him and finds the Borg Queen in his place, _Resistance,_ she drones, _is futile._

It’s cold, so cold. Where is Chakotay? She needs to tell him. Reaching back, Kathryn places her hand over the barrette at the back of her hair but instead of soothingly smooth it’s sharp against her palm. She pulls her hand in front of her face to examine the damage and something comes with it… ripping… tearing. A scorpion, clinging to her flesh.

Not Alone. All Alone. Her ears ring.

Sickbay, when she comes to, somehow seems less vivid than the dream she’s left behind. She scans past the doctor looking for something… for Chakotay she realizes. He isn’t there. Her brain sifts through memories, trying to reorient and remember how she came to be lying here. Why he isn’t there to smile softly down at her and why she feels like he should be.

He’d come to her on invitation, trusting that crisis or no she still meant for him to follow the breadcrumbs of hope she left him. And she’d almost let him, almost fallen into the reassurance he provided, started to tell him.

_Today I can't imagine a day without you._

_You're not alone, Kathryn._

A few moments more and she’d have been feasting on something better than dinner. Instead they’d been interrupted and she’d reversed course.

Captain. First Officer. Orders. A fatal mistake.

Alone. She could still hear the sharpness of her own voice dismissing him echoing inside her skull. She had reached out for him, later, but it was too little and too late.

“Chakotay…” her voice sounds strange to her own ears as she pushes herself up from the biobed and onto shaky legs and feet.

“I’ll get him down here, Captain, but...” the doctor says in a tone that makes her more concerned than Chakotay’s absence from her sickbed already had.

Nothing he has to say makes it better. Her determination to make things right with Chakotay. The belief that it can be that simple… vanishes. He had promised to follow her commands, damnit.

_Why?_

The question only screams louder by the time they are standing face to face. This isn’t the conversation they were meant to be having. She woke up wanting to reconcile, to bridge the gap and instead they are at odds again, more than ever.

_Why?_

_Why didn’t you trust me?_

_Why didn’t you follow my orders?_

_Why can’t we see eye to eye on this?_

_Why can’t I bring myself to even want you to have been right?_

This. This couldn’t go on.

“There are two wars going on. The one out there, and the one in here, and we're losing both of them,” she pulls herself out of the spiral, forces herself to acknowledge the signs she’s been ignoring.

He looks tired. He was still so visibly relieved to see her when he knew she’d be angry.

“It will be your undoing,” he replies, words sounding disjointed coming out of his mouth.

“What?” she waits for the point he must be sitting on.

“Our conflicted nature. Our individuality. Seven of Nine said that we lack the cohesion of a Collective mind. That one day it would divide us and destroy us. And here we are, proving her point.”

She can hear the cost of his words in his voice, the sharpness in forming the borg drone’s designation, the hope and fear in the word ‘we’.

She has been so afraid of letting him influence or sway her, when it was inevitable, when it was in fact his job. _You were so afraid that your feelings for him would make you treat him as more than your first officer that you treated him as less, Kathryn,_ she chides herself.

They can’t keep fighting. She won’t let the Borg break them, let them break themselves.

“I'll tell you when we lost control of this situation, when we made our mistake. It was the moment we turned away from each other,” she says more to herself than him, after all: she was the one that did the initial turning, “We don't have to stop being individuals to get through this, we just have to stop fighting each other.”

She finds she had been forgetting who he is, what he has to offer the captain and not just the woman.

They are such a good team. Why have they been acting like anything else? _If you’d planned with him from the beginning,_ a voice inside of her chides, _Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place._

They will get out of it. They will get free of this catastrophe and they will bandage all the cuts and bruises of their words and lack thereof with soft lips and warm hands.

 

**Not Shown**

She sees the look in his eyes as the pieces fall into place. The hurt. The questioning. _Why?_ How can she tell him, without undoing what she’s sacrificed for? Time to put her armor back on, to take back up her ceaseless watch.

_I didn’t do it to send you a message. I did it to drive home one for myself. To force my hand. I’m weak, Chakotay. When it comes to you I’ve grown ever so weak._

She can’t afford to be. Not even with him. Maybe especially not with him.

_I can’t wear your gifts in my hair if there isn’t enough hair left to hold them._

It’s a juvenile gesture, this attempt to use symbolism to change the truth within herself.

_For you, a simple word would have sufficed. You would have listened, been strong._

She needs whatever crutch she can grab hold of.

She had convinced herself she was stronger than this, better, that she could hold the line. The truth is that she was never in control of this thing between them, not because he was but simply because all the excuses in the world couldn’t fully hide that she couldn’t help herself. Every time she chose yes, every time she indulged, it was less likely she would hold back the next.

_I kept telling myself I could stop at any time but I never did._

She sounds like an addict, to herself, and when you are an alcoholic you have to go completely dry.

_I’d sacrifice myself for any member of this crew, but I’d sacrifice the rest of them too if it meant not losing him/_ There it is, the realization that had startled her out of her stupor. Her loyalty, her heart, can’t be to any one person on this ship.

That’s why she has to rip herself away from him, tear her heart back into her own chest.

_I have to give you up because I can’t; because, I was ready to burn this ship to ashes along with everyone inside of it rather than let you go._ She can’t tell him that, not without the opposite happening.

“Neck finally get sore?” he tries to joke, but she can see how carefully he is watching her, trying not to overreact, not to jump to conclusions.

This once she wishes he would.

“I finally succumbed to the inevitability of being pulled out of bed to red alert in the middle of the night and needing to make a more practical choice to be ready at a moment’s notice.”

“The hair never seemed to slow you down from what I saw.”

He’d seen a lot, not just literally but in every sense. We had she mentioned being in bed at all? It had invited the reminder of that intimacy she has to set aside.

“That’s what I tried to tell myself,” she pauses, trying to figure out how to have this conversation without… having it, “But just because we enjoy something doesn’t mean we can keep it.”

“Kathryn?” he lets the question remain implied.

“Don’t make this harder.”

Even now, she lacks control, finds herself leaning on him for support. She needs to stand on her own two feet.

“I wish you’d explain. I hope you change your mind.”

“It would be easier if I could promise never to…” she feels the lump at the back of her throat, “For both of us. But I don’t want to swear what I can’t guarantee.”

If she could promise that, there wouldn’t be a stash of his gifts tucked safely away back in her quarters, instead of recycled into the replicator where she ought to have consigned them to eternity. She hadn’t had the strength to banish them forever, though, just as she is struggling not to give him the answers he wants instead of those she must.

“Then don’t,” he retreats, not pursing a final answer that he doesn’t want any more than she wants to give, “Say for now and let me dream of a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“I can’t promise that either,” she sighs, “Not without losing my resolve.”

“Would that be so bad?” he asks, “I thought you’d decided to stop fighting this battle.”

She had. She thought she was standing on solid ground, but the truth is that she’d been sinking further and and further into him, that she hadn’t found peace but abandon, and she couldn’t afford to be caught unaware by anyone else. He would be steadfast but enemies were always at the gate.

“The battle goes on whether I hide from it or not. Please Chakotay… help me.”

It’s manipulative of her, unfair, cruel even, but he doesn’t object or call her out on those truths. It would be easier if he did, if he became something to fight.

“Always,” he says so sadly she thinks her heart might actually stop, “I promised.”

Of course there’s a part of her that wishes he wouldn’t. She hates this, hates the future she’s walking them into. She wants to hide in his warmth, to draw from his strength not just as a captain but as a woman, but that is exactly why she cannot, why she never should have.

It’s a paradox, and one that she has to live with.

**Author's Note:**

> Written to [ rawkfemme](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rawkfemme/pseuds/rawkfemme)'s request (which I promised I'd fulfill last fall... sorry it's been so long) for a fic in which the barrettes we see Janeway wear in Season 3 and early Season 4 (before the "Year of Hell" chop) were crafted by Chakotay while they were on New Earth during "Resolutions".
> 
> Thank you to [ Talsi74656](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Talsi74656/pseuds/Talsi74656) for talking me through the writing process and encouraging me when I hated everything that I typed and wanted to give up, and to [ Helen8462 ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Helen8462/pseuds/Helen8462)for the beta-ing help in making the fic more coherent and less confusing.


End file.
